About us…
Sweet Elements is run by Faye and Rob.
Faye is the baking talent behind Sweet Elements. Born in Portugal to a Swedish father and Maltese mother, Faye was brought up in Sweden and then, for most of her childhood, in Athens before moving to Malta at 17. Faye has always been obsessed with food, cooking and baking. Even as a late teenager, Faye was baking and catering for events from her home in Malta. Since then, Faye has run a novelty cake business, worked in hotels, restaurants and catering companies during her 12 years in London and more recently worked as a consultant to bakery businesses. Not only is her expertise founded on her wide experience but it is also built on her pâtisserie training at Le Cordon Bleu, her forensic attention to detail and her relentless appetite for continuing to learn and develop.
Faye and Rob met at a mutual friends’ lunch in London in 2018. We both share a love of all things food, cooking and eating. After a career as commercial litigation lawyer, Rob was looking for a new business challenge and this led to setting up Sweet Elements Pâtisserie. The ethos of our pâtisserie was to create a standard of cakes and desserts that one would normally only find in high end hotels and restaurants and make them available on the high street.
We made many thousands of cakes and desserts in hundreds of different varieties, all to the same exacting standards, but following the birth of our daughter Neve, we closed the pâtisserie in 2022. Although we got a lot of things right, we also got a lot of things wrong. Ultimately, the unsociable hours that go hand in hand with running a hospitality business made running the business incompatible with bringing up Neve in the way that we wanted to.
But with Faye’s extensive training and experience, as well as the knowledge we had both gained from our time running the pâtisserie, we knew we had a lot to offer others who share our passion for creating cakes and desserts. So, this is how our recipe and e-book online service came to be!
Whilst Faye is now professionally trained and highly experienced, she knows what it is like to start out on your own baking at home or setting out on a new baking business venture. It can be a lonely place and where do you go for reliable technical help?
We wanted to take our knowledge to provide a service to help others who want to learn, but with an uncompromising focus on the use of natural, good quality and responsibly sourced ingredients. We have always appreciated high quality ingredients, not only for cooking at home but it was a central part of our pâtisserie business. With Neve’s arrival we became even more focussed on where our food is coming from and what goes into it. Most importantly, we wanted to make sure that Neve’s exposure to the harmful practices found in so much of modern food production is limited as much as it can be
In the cake and dessert world there is not enough focus on the use of quality ingredients; there is still widespread reliance on artificial colours and flavours as well as ingredients that have been produced using practices that are damaging to the environment and our health. There is no need for this. We can show you how to use sound techniques, apply them to natural and high quality ingredients and create cakes and desserts that have real flavour.
For us food is about quality not quantity. So next time you decide to bake, why not try a recipe that prioritises the use of great ingredients and technique to give you the cake or dessert you want.